“... boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us ...”

“... whoever wrote it … A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much ...”

“... between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical ...”

“... to the Bard in Westminster Abbey as a way of advertising their superior patriotism. The actor David Garrick also used the Bard to inflate and dignify his own career, puffing him as the nation’s number-one playwright – just like Lawrence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh would go on to do – as a means of representing himself as its number-one actor. He had ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”

“... successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London (and himself a future Archbishop of York), published an attack on Catholic exorcists in general and on the Jesuit William Weston in particular. It has been known since ...”

“... was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and public meetings ...”

“... general reading public. So much for Europe, and for the few American writers – Lowell, Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop – who share European values. But American literature, on the whole, is – to a degree Bayley thinks perverse – internalised; it lives by starving itself, cultivates impoverishment, blankness and homelessness. It doesn’t tell stories: ‘we ...”

“... as a metaphysical doctrine, it was designed to stabilise both state and monarchy. As set out in Elizabeth I’s reign it decreed that The King has in him two Bodies, viz, a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities … But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or ...”

“... circuit, from California to Australia, from the Netherlands to Benares. One daughter, the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, remembered the family sitting with hands outstretched, in a cloud of incense, chanting ‘I am a link in a golden chain of love which stretches round the world’; their father, one imagines, was not in the room. Edwin Lutyens, having ...”

“... of high status all over the world look out from magnificent portraits, defying all encumbrances. David Cannadine’s study Ornamentalism wittily captures the ways the governors and viceroys of the British Empire vied with Indian rajahs and African kings in their spectacular apparel, all of them arrayed in plumes, festoons and baubles. Something about ...”

“... girls, swearing, having it in for people and doing impressions of what Bradford calls Lord David Cecil’s ‘upper-middle-class drawl’. By the standards of the time their jokes had a punk rock aspect – Amis wrote fondly years later of the days when saying ‘fuck’ counted as ‘the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger’ – and many of the ...”

“... ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the characteristics of the best Victorian verse: the vivid and disturbing pictures, the rich organ music ...”

“... Here the shape of the future is suggested by Reading Herodotus (2007), a study of Book 5 edited by Elizabeth Irwin and Emily Greenwood, where a group of scholars got together, divided up the text and put the resultant findings through the wringer of collective criticism. Everywhere else there is a real embarras de richesses, a dazzling variety of (not seldom ...”

“... power of the tenants. It’s true that the dame or seigneur has held Sark as a Crown fief since Elizabeth I granted the island to Helier de Carteret in 1565, on condition that he defend it against her enemies. He divided the land into forty tenements, each with property rights in perpetuity and reciprocal duties of defence and tithe. (Until 2021, tenements ...”